The quiet, orderly household in Windsor Forest received but few visitors, and those chiefly of the family faith. Such, for example, were the Carylls of West Grinstead, and the Blounts of Mapledurham, where there were two bright-eyed daughters of Pope's own age, the "fair-hair'd Martha and Teresa brown," whose names, linked in Gay's dancing-verse, were afterward to be indissolubly connected with that of their Binfield neighbor. At this date, however, they must have been school-girls at Hammersmith, under some pre-Thackerayan Miss Pinkerton, or else were being "finished" at that Paris establishment whence they derived the foreign cachet which is said to have been part of their charm. Another friend was the ex-statesman and ambassador, Sir William Trumbull of East Hampstead, who compared artichokes with the father and read poetry with the son. To Trumbull Pope submitted some of his earliest verses, and from him, it seems, received much valuable advice, including a recommendation to translate Homer. Another acquaintance was the minor poet and criticaster, William Walsh, who gave his young friend that memorable (and somewhat ambiguous) injunction to "study the ancients" and "be correct." He had been introduced to Walsh by another man of letters, whose acquaintance he must have made during one of his brief excursions to London, the whilom dramatist Wycherley—now a broken septuagenarian, but still retaining a sort of bankrupt bel air. To Wycherley, who could not tear himself from his favorite St. James's, the youthful Pope wrote literary letters, being even decoyed into patching and revising the old beau's senile verses. Another of his correspondents was Henry Cromwell—Gay's "honest, hatless Cromwell, with red breeches," who at this time was playing the part of an elderly Phaon to the Sappho of a third-rate poetess, Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas. The epistles of the boy at Binfield to these battered men about town, when not discussing metres and the precepts of M. the Abbé Bossu, in a style modelled upon Balzac and Voiture, are sometimes sorry reading. But both Wycherley and Cromwell were wits and men of education, and it is not difficult to pardon that morbid, over-active mind for occasional vagrancy in its efforts after some congenial escape from the Tory fox-hunters of Berkshire and the ribald drinking songs of Durfey.
By 1711, when Pope was three-and-twenty, his intercourse with Wycherley and Cromwell had practically ceased, and "knowing Walsh" was dead. But he had already obtained a hearing as a poet. He had written a series of "Pastorals" in the reigning taste, a taste which, under guise of imitating Theocritus and Virgil, not only transferred to our bleaker shores the fauna and flora of Italy and Greece, but brought along with them the light-clad (and somewhat embarrassed) Delias and Sylvias of those sunnier lands. Pope, indeed, partly modified this. He drew the line at wolves, for instance, though (as Mr. Leslie Stephen suggests) this mattered little when altars and milk-white sacrificial bulls were still "perpetually retained." But the main feature of the "Pastorals" was less their subject than their versification, which in these earliest efforts was already as finished and as artful as anything Pope ever wrote, and was far above the work of his contemporaries. Lansdowne ("Granville the polite"), Congreve, Garth, Halifax, and others praised them warmly in MS., and left-legged Jacob Tonson came cap in hand to solicit them for the sixth part of his "Miscellany," where they ultimately wound up that volume, balancing (or rather over-balancing) the "Pastorals" of Ambrose Philips, which began it. To the same collection Pope contributed an imitation of Chaucer, and an episode from the "Iliad." The immediate success of these performances seems to have set him upon his next poem, the "Essay on Criticism," which was published by Lewis in 1711. His mastery over his medium was still more noticeable than the originality of his thought. But this cento of exquisitely chiselled critical commonplaces goes far toward being a chef d'œuvre of mere manipulative skill; and we are still, by our daily use of some of its lines, justifying the truth of Addison's dictum, that "Wit and fine Writing doth not consist so much in advancing Things that are new as in giving Things that are known an agreeable Turn."
To the "Essay on Criticism" succeeded one of Pope's most brilliant poems, the famous "Rape of the Lock." In its first form it appeared, together with some minor poems and translations, in a volume of "Miscellanies" published by Tonson's rival, Lintot. Its motif was the theft by a certain Lord Petre of one of the tresses of Miss Arabella or "Belle" Fermor, and this venial larceny having somewhat strained the relations of the two families concerned, Pope was invited to compose matters by invocation of the Muse. The poem in its first "Miscellany" form consisted of no more than two cantos; but Pope, confident of his powers, and certainly with a better knowledge of his own method than his critics could have possessed, boldly took advantage of its success to expand it into five cantos by the addition of a Rosicrucian machinery of sylphs and gnomes. This apparently hazardous experiment was perfectly successful, and the "Rape of the Lock" became what it remains, the typical example of raillery in English verse—the solitary specimen of sustained and airy grace. If it has faults, they are the faults of the time, and not of the poem, the execution of which is a marvel of ease, good humor, and delicate irony. Another of Pope's efforts at this date was "Windsor Forest," a theme which, assuming that to be the best which lies nearest, should have afforded material for another enduring success. But Pope, with a matchless eye for manners, looked at nature with the unpurged vision of his generation, and the poem, though not without dignity and beauty of versification, is, to the modern reader, cold and conventional.
To the reader under Anne it was otherwise, for to him "verdant isles" and "waving groves" and the whole farrago of gradus epithets were not only grateful but indispensable. "Mr. Pope," wrote Swift to Stella under date of March, 1713, "has published a fine poem called 'Windsor Forest.' Read it." This is the only time Pope is mentioned in that memorable journal (now nearing its closing pages) and it scarcely points to any close relations. But, by and by, when Swift came back from his Irish deanery to reconcile Oxford and Bolingbroke, he seems to have made Pope's personal acquaintance, and to have begun the correspondence which lasted so long. By Swift, Pope was introduced to Oxford, to his later "guide, philosopher, and friend," Bolingbroke, to the gentle and humane Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, to Prior and Parnell, to Arbuthnot, best of men and physicians—some of whom he mentions in the "Prologue to the Satires." Swift, he says:
"endur'd my rays;
The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read;
Ev'n mitred Rochester would nod the head,
And St. John's self (great Dryden's friends before)
With open arms receiv'd one Poet more."
Closely connected with the group of Pope's connections at this time was the famous literary association known as the "Scriblerus Club," the avowed object of which was to satirize the abuses of human learning. The dispersal of its members at the death of Anne interrupted this enterprise, which never extended beyond a first book—a fragment which must, however, be held to have been unusually pregnant in suggestion, since it contained the germs of "Gulliver's Travels" and the "Dunciad." But Pope's life at this point grows too complicated to be pursued in detail, and it will be impossible henceforth to do more than note briefly its chief incidents. Trumbull's counsel to him to translate Homer, and his first essay in Tonson's "Miscellany," have already been mentioned. In a later volume of "Miscellany" poems edited by Steele, he had printed some specimens from the "Odyssey," and in the following year he embarked in the great work of his middle life, the translation of the "Iliad." By 1715 the first volume, containing four books, was issued to the subscribers, whose roll, ennobled by the patronage of Oxford and Bolingbroke, and extended by the imperious advocacy of Swift, included almost everyone of importance. The only blot upon its brilliant success is the unfortunate quarrel with Addison, which led to the portrait of Atticus.
Early in 1716, not long after the death of Wycherley, Pope moved from Binfield to Chiswick. His house, in what was then known as the "New Buildings," but is now Mawson's Row, still exists down a turning off the Mall, not very far from the old Church where Hogarth lies buried, and from Chiswick House, the mansion of Lord Burlington, under whose wing Pope describes himself as residing. Here, for a couple of years, were delivered those letters, upon whose backs or envelopes, piously preserved in the British Museum, the "paper-sparing" poet penned his daily tale of Homeric translation, completing two more volumes of the "Iliad" during his sojourn in Mawson's Row. At this time he was twenty-eight, and may therefore be assumed to be accurately represented in the portrait painted by Kneller in 1716, and mezzotinted a year later by Smith. Here he appears as a slight, delicate young man, wearing a close-fitting vest or tunic, and, in lieu of a wig, the dressing or "night-cap" which took its place. His keen, shaven face is already worn by work and ill-health, and conspicuous for the large and brilliant eyes to which he refers, in his "Epistle to Arbuthnot," as one of his noticeable features.
Besides the poems already mentioned, he had, in 1715, produced another imitation of Chaucer, the "Temple of Fame," an effort which has never taken high rank among his works. But while at Chiswick he published, in addition to instalments of the "Iliad," two pieces of considerable merit, although they are scarcely regarded by the critics of this age with the enthusiasm they excited in Pope's earliest admirers. One is the celebrated "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," which perhaps owes some of its reputation to the difficulty experienced in identifying the "ever injur'd Shade" intended. She is now understood to have been a much-persecuted Mrs. Weston, who, although she suffered many griefs, did not (as her poet implies) put an end to her own life in consequence. The other, under the title of "Eloisa to Abelard," versifies the Latin letters of that distinguished amorist to her lover. It is impossible to deny to both these works the utmost amount of artful development and verbal finish. All that skill can do in the simulation of sincerity Pope has done. "The Epistle of Eloisa," he tells a correspondent, "grows warm, and begins to have some breathings of the heart in it, which may make posterity think I was in love." With all submission, this is precisely the illusion which is absent, and it is perfectly possible for the most sympathetic reader to peruse the balanced outpourings of "Fulbert's niece" without the slightest tendency to that globus hystericus which all persons of sensibility must desire to experience. Yet it must nevertheless be admitted that these poems are the best examples of a vein which is not native to their writer, and that, in them, Pope comes nearer to genuine pathos than in any other of his works. Next to these, the only literary event of this portion of his career is his connection with the deplorable "Three Hours after Marriage," a farce in which he was assisted by Arbuthnot and Gay, the latter of whom bore the blame of the play's failure. Pope's old enemy Dennis, was caricatured in it as Sir Tremendous; but it had also the effect of adding another and abler foe to the list of his opponents, the player and manager, Colley Cibber, whose open ridicule of a part of this ill-judged jeu d'esprit began the feud which ultimately secured for him the supreme honors of the "Dunciad."
But although Pope's militant nature never feared to make an enemy, his friends were still in the majority. His "Homer," with its magnificent subscription list, had opened a wider world to him; and his new associates seem for the time to have partially seduced him from his valetudinarian régime and ten hours daily study. In his varied and alembicated correspondence we track him here and there, at Oxford or at Bath, studying architecture with my Lord Burlington and gardening with my Lord Bathurst or "beating the rounds" (probably only in metaphor) with wilder wits such as my Lord of Warwick and Holland. One of the prettiest of Pope's missives (some of them are not pretty) to "Mademoiselles de Maple-Durham," as he styles the Blounts, describes a visit he had paid to Queen Caroline's maids of honor at Hampton Court, the Bellenden and Lepel of his minor verses. He dilates upon their monotonous life of hunting, etiquette, and Westphalia ham, and then, not (as Carruthers suggests) without oblique intention of lighting a spark of jealousy in the fair Martha's bosom, records how he walked for three or four mortal hours by moonlight with Mrs. Lepel, meeting never a creature of quality but his Majesty King George I., giving audience to his Vice Chamberlain "all alone under the garden wall." Another epistolary idyl to Martha Blount, of which there are at least four replicas, relates the sentimental death by lightning of the two haymakers at Stanton Harcourt. Did Pope write this letter? or did Gay? Or did they write it both together? This is a question which Pope's editors have failed to settle. At all events, a similar composition went to another of Pope's flames, the brilliant Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, now absent from England with her husband, who was ambassador at Constantinople. Clever Lady Mary, however, entirely declined to be subjugated by the pathetic fallacy, and sent back a matter-of-fact epitaph for John Hewet and Sarah Drew, which, though it wound up with a compliment to her correspondent, can hardly have gratified him. But there is one letter of this time the sincerity of which is undoubted. It is Pope's announcement to Martha Blount of his father's death. "My poor Father dyed last night," it says. "Believe, since I don't forget you this moment, I never shall. A. Pope." The antithetical touch shows how art had become a second nature with the writer; but his attachment and devotion to his parents is not one of the disputed points in his story.
Alexander Pope the elder died in October, 1717. Not very long after, the poet moved with his mother to a little villa, or "villakin" as Swift called it, on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham, close to the grotesque Gothic jumble known as Radnor House. At Twickenham or, as he called it, "Twitnam," Pope continued to reside until his death, his permanent house-mates being his old nurse, Mary Beach, to whom there is a tablet on the outer wall of Twickenham Church, and his mother, who survived her husband until 1733, only preceding her famous son by eleven years. Pope tended her with exemplary care—a care rendered daily more imperative by her increasing infirmities. Many references to her occur in his correspondence, and the sedulous inquiries made by his friends as to her health are earnest of her son's unwearied solicitude. One or two of the old lady's simple, homely letters to him have been preserved, with their fond messages and faulty spelling. Now and then, it is recorded, he would gratify her by setting her to transcribe his "Homer," an assistance of which the advantages must have been debatable.